A people's tragedy

100 Cannibals with their victims

101 Street orphans in Saratov hunt for food in a rubbish tip

102 The Secretary of the Tula Komsomol

103 A juvenile unit of the Red Army in Turkestan

104 Red Army soldiers confiscate valuables from the Semenov Monastery

105 A propaganda meeting in Bukhara

106 Two Bolshevik commissars in the Far East

107 The dying Lenin in 1923

Photographic Credits

Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University: 58; California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside: 20. Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford, California: 82–4; Life on the Russian Country Estate. A Social and Cultural history, by Priscilla Roosevelt (Yale University Press, 1995): 26; Museum of the Revolution, Moscow: 7, 15, 36, 52, 61–2, 77–8, 90; Photokhronika Tass, Moscow: 107; private collections: 10, 32, 97; Russian in Original Photographs 1860–1920, by Marvin Lyons (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1977): 25, 47; Russie, 1904–1924: La Révolution est là, (Baschet, Paris, 1978): 80; Russian Century, The, by Brian Moynahan (Chatto & Windus, London, 1994): 13, 28 (courtesy of Slava Katamidze Collection/Endeavour Group, London), 46 (Courtesy of the Endeavour Group, London); Russian State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, Krasnogorsk: 18–19, 21–3, 35, 37–8, 40, 45, 48, 51, 59–60, 65–71, 73–6, 79, 81, 85–93, 98–106; Russian State Military History Archive, Moscow: 29; Saltykov-Shchedrin Library, St Petersburg: 12; State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, St Petersburg: 1–6, 8–9, 11, 14, 16–17, 24, 27, 30–1, 34, 39, 41–4, 49–50, 53–7, 63–4, 72, 94–6; Tula District Museum: 33.

Note on Dates

Until February 1918 Russia adhered to the Julian (Old Style) calendar, which ran thirteen days behind the Gregorian (New Style) calendar in use in Western Europe. The Soviet government switched to the New Style calendar at midnight on 31 January 1918: the next day was declared 14 February. Dates relating to domestic events are given in the Old Style up until 31 January 1918; and in the New Style after that. Dates relating to international events (e.g. diplomatic negotiations and military battles in the First World War) are given in the New Style throughout the book.

NB The term ‘the Ukraine’ has been used throughout this book, rather than the currently correct but ahistorical ‘Ukraine’.

For Stephanie

Introduction to the 100th Anniversary Edition

It is hard to think of an event, or series of events, that has affected the history of the past one hundred years more profoundly than the Russian Revolution of 1917. A generation after the establishment of the Soviet system, one-third of the human race was living under regimes modelled, more or less, upon it. The fear of Bolshevism was a major factor in the rise of fascist movements, leading to the outbreak of the Second World War. From 1945, the export of the Leninist model to Eastern Europe, China, South-East Asia, Africa and Central America engulfed the world in a long Cold War, which came to an uncertain end only with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. ‘The revolution of 1917 has defined the shape of the contemporary world, and we are only now emerging from its shadow,’ I wrote in the Preface to the first edition of A People’s Tragedy in 1996. Today, in 2017, that shadow still hangs darkly over Russia and the fragile new democracies that emerged from the Soviet Union. Its presence can be felt in the revolutionary and terrorist movements of our age. As I warned in the final sentence of A People’s Tragedy, ‘The ghosts of 1917 have not been laid to rest.’

That was not how it appeared to many in the years immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was a widespread feeling, in the West at least, that the Russian Revolution was over, its false gods toppled by democracy. In that moment of democratic triumph and triumphalism, Francis Fukuyama wrote his influential book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), in which he announced the ultimate victory of liberal capitalism in its great ideological battle against communism. ‘What we are witnessing,’ Fukuyama wrote, ‘is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’